Research

PUBLICATION

• Industry-university collaboration and commercializing Chinese corporate innovation.  |  David Hsu, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Kaiguo Zhou, and Tong Zhou (paper)
  Management Science, 71(6), 2025.
  Think tank coverage: Mack Institute and Xueshuo.
  Summary: industry-university collaboration synergizes complementary research and development and promotes corporate technology commercialization performance through technology transfers, knowledge acquisition and talent recruiting.

• Labor-replacing automation and finance.  |  Xin Cheng, Evgeny Lyandres, Kaiguo Zhou, and Tong Zhou (paper)
  Management Science, 71(8), 2025.
  Think tank coverage: Xueshuo.
  Social media: LinkedIn and WeChat of Management Science.
  Summary: being a substitute for labor, the adoption of industrial robots provides a hedge against labor supply uncertainty; thus, it reduces the cost of debt and increases leverage.

• Patent thickets, stock returns, and conditional CAPM.  |  Po-Hsuan Hsu, Hsiao-Hui Lee, and Tong Zhou (paper)
  Management Science, 68(11), 2022.
  Think tank coverage: Technology Policy Research Initiative (TPRI).
  Summary: patent thickets, a phenomenon of fragmented ownership of overlapping patent rights, hamper firms’ commercialization of patents and thus deliver asset pricing implications.

• [SOLO]  Adverse effects of financial innovation on technological innovation: The case of commodity futures.  |  Tong Zhou (paper)
  Research Policy, accepted.
  Summary: as unintended consequences, commodity futures trading is found to reduce innovation outputs, decrease R&D inputs, and weaken firms’ exploratory nature of innovation.

• Benchmarking U.S. university patent value and commercialization efforts: A new approach.  |  David H. Hsu, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Tong Zhou, and  Arvids A. Ziedonis (paper)
  Research Policy, 50(1), 2021.
  Think tank coverage: BusinessThink and Mack Institute.
  Summary: we propose and apply a novel finance-based methodology to valuate universities’ patents and evaluate their patent commercialization efficiency.

• [SOLO]  Ambiguity, asset illiquidity, and price variability.  |  Tong Zhou (paper, online appendix)
  Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, 191, 2021.
  Summary: I develop a sequential trading model and provide a novel theoretical explanation to the historical coincidence of ambiguous events, asset illiquidity, and price variability.

• ETF dividend cycle. | Pekka Honkanen, Yapei Zhang, and Tong Zhou (paper)
  Critical Finance Review, 14(3), 2025.
  Media coverage: Bloomberg.
  Summary: we document a new stylized fact that the dividend policies of ETFs generate price impacts on money market funds and the treasury markets.

• The bright and dark sides of minority shareholder protection: Evidence from the separate vote counts disclosure rule in China. | Guowei Cai, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Xinyi Xu, Tong Zhou, and Yadian Zhu (paper)
  Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, 82, 2023.
  Summary: Allowing minority shareholders to voice out, the policy on the one hand restricts the value-deteriorating tunneling behaviors, but on the other hand could weaken corporate investment efficiency due to information asymmetry.

• Bank branching and corporate tax avoidance: Evidence from a quasi-natural experiment of banking deregulation in China | Xiaoxia Li and Tong Zhou (paper)
  China Journal of Accounting Studies, 12(3), 2024.
  Summary: banking deregulation reduces corporate tax avoidance through two channels: alleviating financial constraints and strengthening external monitoring.

• 产学研合作促进企业自身技术创新吗？——兼论政府与市场的作用与边界.  |  周开国、卢允之、周彤 (全文)
  统计研究, 42(4), 2025.
  Summary: market liberalization could facilitate technology transfers through IUC for lagging firms, while intellectual property protection is essential for leading firms to benefit from IUC.

• 理财产品市场服务了实体经济吗？——基于投资收益税改政策的准自然实验.   |  才国伟、朱雅典、周彤 (全文)
  统计研究, 39(6), 2022.
  Summary: As corporate debts and loans constitutes a large chunk of the underlying assets of wealth management products, the liberalization of this market facilitates corporate borrowing.

WORKING PAPERS

• Medical innovation, human capital productivity, and the cross section of stock returns.  |  Tong Zhou (paper)

• The rise and fall of university-run firms in China. | David Hsu, Po-Hsuan Hsu, Kaiguo Zhou, and Tong Zhou (paper)

• 产学研合作能为企业带来怎样的知识价值？——基于企业创新策略的视角.  |  周开国、卢允之、周彤 (全文)

• 政府引导基金如何促进区域产业高质量发展？.  |  周开国、洪苏婷、周彤、陶涵毅 (全文)

RESEARCH GRANTS

• 国家自然科学基金青年项目（#72003206, 2021-2023）：产学研合作成果转化、企业创新与经济增长——微观大数据经验和机制研究

• 上海市东方英才计划青年项目（2023-2025）：科技创新和金融创新交叉领域研究